Some of you may know that I’ve had this blog for nearly 15 years. The earliest post was May 2006. Here’s a post from those hot summer days when Delhi was baking and I was sitting in our top floor walk-up in East of Kailash, using our old Windows desktop to write those posts. This is the first one with the anteater –
who was going to be one of the characters in an alphabet book I was illustrating at the time. At the time I really didn’t want to be a designer and only wanted to illustrate children’s books, and didn’t even know how important this anteater is going to become in my life!
Anyway I was trying to remember what I was doing ten years ago in September 2010 – it’s only been a decade but feels like a generation in the age of the world. I had just returned from Sweden and had probably started working in TIL by then. By September I had found my groove with drawing again, and was as usual worrying about inspiration, drawing and happiness in Creative block and Being happy.
There’s a game we play at work, called Facts and lies, which goes like this: you have to share three things about yourself that others may not know, and the others have to guess which one is a lie.
I played this with our teams in India and in the States –
So, what did you think? Leave a comment below / send an email.
Honestly who would have thought that we would spend a quarter of a year in physical isolation from each other. A story to recount in my old age.
And speaking of old age. Umberto Eco once wrote that books are the most robust format of content transmission that we have seen over centuries, and so that if nothing else, my sketchbooks would probably survive till my old age at least, and I will look back on these days and laugh…
"Although I cannot see your face
As you flip these poems awhile
Somewhere from some far off place
I hear you laughing -
and I smile..."
Shel Silverstein
These lockdown weekends we get to share our tastes with each other. One weekend morning we watched Maira Kalman videos on Youtube.
Be allowed to be broken and go on anyway…
she said
Words to remember as we try to restore our sanity and get on with life. And Orin really enjoyed Cake, one of her lovely short films which is really a book.
Another Saturday we watched Cars. I remember really loving the character design in the past but I was so dismissive of the movie when it came out, saying “It’s just for four-year-olds!” I laugh at those words now, having seen Agastya go through his Cars phase and also Orin.
‘It’s not Mack Truck Amma, it’s a truck called Mack.”
says he.
And then one evening we were talking about lizards.